Buffalo Grove-Area Schools Discuss Safety Plans

At least two Buffalo Grove area schools districts made little fuss during the school day as word spread about the school shootings in Connecticut that left 27 dead.

“It’s not the kind of thing where we’d turn on the (TV) monitors,” Stevenson spokesman Jim Conrey said.

On Friday, District 96’s elementary and middle schools focused on their regular routines, spokeswoman Betsy Fresen said, but she expects conversation about the shootings to occur next week.

“I’m sure that they’ll be addressing this in the days ahead,” she said.

Principals will work with their staffs to ensure support for their schools is in place, though Fresen could not say Friday what those plans might entail.

District 96 does have safety procedures in place, Fresen said, and “we work with local law enforcement to make sure they are the best they can be.”

At Stevenson High School, the instant alert system would be used to notify parents by phone and email should an emergency occur, spokesman Jim Conrey said. “Then we would do anything we could to communicate by social media.”

The school has “a very detailed safety plan. It’s about 100 pages thick,” Conrey said. Administrators have copies of the plan and a summary of it is provided to the entire staff, so that everyone understands what their role would entail.

In an emergency, police would block off the campus, Conrey said. The school’s staff practices its lockdown procedure about once per year, he said.

And while it generally doesn’t warrant a full lockdown, about once per year the school is encouraged by police to close the campus to incoming and exiting traffic while officers try to locate a suspect in the area.

One security measure that’s employed daily is the background check of visitors. Visiting graduates, volunteers and new substitute teachers must show identification as they enter the building, and staff runs them through a database that checks for criminal backgrounds, Conrey said.

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